Re: chromium: pkgsrc import request

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost> writes:

>> I would like to start the requesting process to import chromium to the
>> pkgsrc. Is it acceptable chromium support NetBSD only from 10 of
>> release?
>
> For a package as useful as chromium I would normally encourage trying
> to make it available all officially supported NetBSD versions, but at
> this point NetBSD-9 is old enough that we are encountering significant
> problems in building some packages for it, so I would personally be
> happy to see chromium as NetBSD-10 and later only.

I agree that it would be nice, but I suspect, without looking :-), that
this is a combination of
  - upstream has recent requirements
  - NetBSD 9 is too old

As one can see from https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal.html#history

   10.0	March 28, 2024
   9.0	February 14, 2020

IMHO we should not be in the position of having to talk about supporting
9.  I have long said that releases should happen no more than 2 years
apart, and really they should be no more 18 months.

We're coming up on 12 months for 10, so (again IMHO) the release process
for 11 should  be starting, and I view 9 as a temporary issue until fall
of 2025.  I don't actually believe that, but I expect to reach the state
where I no longer care about 9.

But to Robert's question, "is is accpetable", I would say yes, it's
entirely acceptable.   The question is really "would we refuse to add a
package that works on 10 but not 9", and the answer is no, absolutely we
would not, and we have lots of them already.

There's another question, "would we insist that there was some effort to
work on 9 before importing", then maybe, but anyone is welcome to try
it, spend an hour, and contemplate if it is reasonable to adjust.  And
then speak up.  I don't expect to hear that it's adequately easy.


We do have BROKEN_ON and ONLY_FOR.  ONLY_FOR should be used in cases
where there is a good reason that it doesn't make sense for the package
to be on other platforms, such as a package to configure the Foo API
only available on BarOS.  Not working on NetBSD 9 would be "BROKEN_ON";
it ought to work.

> In case I didn't mention it enough before - excellent work on the package

Indeed.  This is such a huge package that it's amazing anyone has gotten
it to work.